Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

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> Bitcoin is doing all of these things without formal institutions, employees, governance, and official regulation.

All at a whopping pace of 4 transactions per second... Which means that if the entire population of Denver used Bitcoin, they'd only get to make a single transaction once every 2 days.

I don't care what you say or what you compare it to, Bitcoin is very inefficient at what it does. And worse, its energy consumption is not a function of its transaction volume, but of its price in fiat. The higher the price, the more energy miners will throw at it as they attempt to win the next block reward.

And it is this way by design. Take all that inefficiency away and you give up all that makes Bitcoin what it is....

source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(population+of+denver)...

> And worse, its energy consumption is not a function of its transaction volume, but of its price in fiat.

It's also a function of time, dropping in half every ~4 years. (Rounding transaction fees to zero)

Which isn't to argue against proof of stake, just to clarify the current situation.

The best way to think about it is like gold. The gold standard didn't mean that everyone was doing day to day trading in gold. While you could carry around physical gold (and coins did contain precious metals), gold-backed notes were a big part of the equation.

If Bitcoin became a major currency, you'd have banks that pay you interest for your deposits and then issue you notes (not necessarily physical). They would pay for your interest and make their profit by lending out a portion of deposits.

So essentially Bitcoin is so terrible as an actual currency / method of transferring money that we'll need to create another crypto on top of it that fixes all of the original issues of Bitcoin. All the while Bitcoin will still be using > 15% of all energy consumed in the world. Oh and we still have to trust Banks to make the underlying transactions on the Bitcoin when we use this new currency but Bitcoin is too slow to keep up with the needed transaction rate.

This is a disaster. And like most technologists, everyone enamored with the technology is completely blind or in denial of the actual societal interaction - which will be abysmam.

Bitcoin will be society's first grey goo. It's just a waiting game until people are ready to admit it.

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